both Kingdom interest and attendance grow, to hear these lovely people say: “My children will marry only in the Lord,” and this after being associated with many centuries of tradition and Eastern-type marriages, to watch them straighten and clean up marital tangles, to see a Hindu explain Bible literature to an island Sunday-school teacher, to hear Indian tots learn their first English words, Jehovah’s name and the books of the holy Word, to see them studying as they mind the cattle by the roadside, after backbreaking work in the rice field, to know that they are discussing the wrongness of idolatry, the beauty of Jehovah’s name at the local store and other places, to have an elderly Indian mother call you brother and sister and ask to go with you to tell the folk about the true God, although she cannot read or write any language. She can speak the truth in her own tongue. All this adds up to a priceless reward for having taken the step that we did in answer to the call from the South Pacific. For Jehovah’s goodness we are most humbly grateful.

We hope that our little experience will awaken in you the desire to come to this joyous field ripe for garnering. In the New World society of Jehovah’s witnesses there must be many more persons that can answer a call where the need is great.

“The Universal Legends of a Flood”

In their book Target: Earth Allan Kelly and Frank Dachille discuss the significance of what they call “the universal legends of a flood of titanic proportions.” They write: “In the ordinary experience of man floods are not of such great or of such widespread occurrence that he would generate a story of an overwhelming, all-exterminating flood. Except for some parts of the world such as Japan, where tidal waves are quite destructive, floods are, and were, of little consequence to the security of man compared to the danger from wild animals, drought, famine, pestilential diseases or even the intense winter storms in northern regions. Why then should practically all races of men have this legend of a great deluge? Why should people who lived far from the ocean in dry highland country such as central Mexico or central Asia have a legend of a flood? . . . It is difficult to explain why the universal deluge was chosen as the method of exterminating man unless it had been an actual experience. If universal deluge had not been an actuality, then some races would have had their wicked ancestors being eliminated by awesome volcanic eruptions, great blizzards, drought, wild animals, giants or demons. Thus the universality of the deluge story is one of the best arguments for its truth.”

“An Absolutely Damning Indictment”

Dr. John Knox, professor of sacred literature at Union Theological Seminary, commented not long ago about Christendom’s religion: “A woman writing in one of our national magazines a few years ago remarked that early in her career she turned from the church because it seemed to her to have too little contact with either the first century or the twentieth to be significant. . . . I have not forgotten the sting of that opening remark, the sharp decisiveness of her dismissal of the church. Can anyone deny that there is truth in her indictment? And who will dispute that, in so far as it is true, it is an absolutely damning indictment? Certainly, critics may argue, we have the right to expect that the church shall be in touch with reality somewhere: if not with our own century, then at least with the first; if not with the first, then by all means with the twentieth. Or to state the issue from the Christian’s point of view, what could we say in justification of a Christianity that was both unauthentic and irrelevant?”—Union Seminary Quarterly Review, November, 1953.